


The Best That We Can Do

by Black_Crystal_Dragon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Guilt, M/M, Survivor Guilt, Time Travel, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 10:27:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19083160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Crystal_Dragon/pseuds/Black_Crystal_Dragon
Summary: A way that Steve’s departure at the very end ofEndgamecould have gone down, in a very slightly different universe.Inspired by Peggy’s really good piece of advice inThe Winter Soldierthat Steve has conveniently forgotten: “The world has changed, and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best that we can do is to start over.”





	The Best That We Can Do

**Author's Note:**

> This arrived in my head fully-formed on the morning of Monday 13 May and wouldn't leave until I wrote it.
> 
> Thank you to my lovely patient BFF and beta [Ice_Elf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ice_Elf/pseuds/Ice_Elf), in particular for helping me to realise where this fic should end. Any remaining mistakes and inconsistencies are mine.

Steve stood on the porch, trying to work up the courage to knock. From his perspective, it was over a decade since he’d seen Peggy – _his_ Peggy, before time and age came between them. From hers, he’d been gone three years. He’d picked this moment after scouring SHIELD’s now-public records, mainly for the fact that she’d moved from a succession of boarding houses to a private home: this was going to be hard enough without having to navigate a landlady or other tenants. He heaved in a deep breath and rapped his knuckles against the front door. There was movement inside and Steve braced himself as footsteps approached down the hallway. He still wasn’t prepared when she opened the door.

For a second, they stared at one another. Steve’s heart was thumping somewhere in the region of his Adam’s apple. It hit him with a jolt that he’d expected her to look different, but it was like she’d stepped out of the photograph he carried in his compass, her hair still dark and full around a face untouched by laugh-lines: the woman he had loved. She produced a gun from somewhere, which wasn’t entirely a surprise, and the shock on her face hardened into anger.

“Who the hell are you?”

He lifted his hands in surrender. “It’s me, Peggy.”

“Steve Rogers is dead,” she said sharply. The gun was pointed right at his chest, not in the least bit sentimental.

“I know,” he murmured, because it was true. He didn’t mean the man trapped under the ice, sleeping through a century of change so he could wake up in time for another war. He meant himself. The Steve she had known _was_ dead, killed by too many losses and betrayals and disappointments, and by the noose of his own principles. He took a deep breath and played the only card he had. “I was wondering about that dance.”

“What?” Peggy whispered, her expression cracking into something more vulnerable, because the subject of their last conversation wasn’t in any history book or exhibit – at least not yet. It was the only thing he could offer as proof.

“I know this is a surprise,” Steve said gently. “But it’s really me. I can explain everything –”

“I think you’d better,” she said, stepping back from the door. “Inside.”

He kept his hands up as he stepped over the threshold and nudged the door closed behind him with his foot. Peggy nodded at the first door on the right, so he obediently went through into the living room and sat down where she indicated, hands where she could see them at all times. It was hard to relax when every muscle in his body was tense with something between nerves and fear, his stomach cramping around the twisted-up guilt that being here, with Peggy, was supposed to ease. He hadn’t expected it to be straightforward and he wasn’t afraid of the gun, for all that he knew Peggy wouldn’t hesitate to use it on him. So why did this feel wrong?

“Start at the beginning,” Peggy demanded. “Last I heard, Steve Rogers went down in the North Atlantic. So how are you here?”

Steve licked his lips and said, “It’s a long story.”

“Oh, I have time,” she said coolly. Somewhere in him, he found a smile.

“Just warning you,” he replied.

It took hours for him to tell her everything – and it was everything, right up to the Infinity Stones he had just returned, including the parasitic survival of Hydra and the fact that Bucky was alive. He had already made this a different reality just by being here and he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to put a few things right. The interrogation that followed was as thorough as he had anticipated, but finally Peggy lowered her weapon and looked at him with her eyes shining.

“Oh, Steve,” she said, holstering the gun as she stepped forwards and opened her arms. She believed him.

He felt every year of his age, time in the ice included, as he levered himself out of the armchair to hold her. She fit against his chest, just the right height to slot them neatly together, and he realised then that he’d never had the chance to do this before. One kiss, that was all they’d shared. He closed his eyes and tried to settle his tripping heartbeat, ignored the shards of glass inside his lungs and told himself that this was what he wanted.

She left behind the scent of her perfume as she shifted back from the embrace and asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I,” he said, and hesitated. His voice rasped out of his throat as he said, “I came for that dance. And – to stay. If you’ll have me.”

Peggy’s eyes were full of compassion as she cupped her hand around his cheek and said, not unkindly, “But there are people who need you, back where you came from.”

Her words twisted in alongside his heart. The ache he had been feeling there ever since he landed in 1948 spread and burned through the whole of his chest. He tried to summon up some anger, so he could demand _what about what I need?_ – but there was none. She was right. She was _right_.

“None of us can go back,” Peggy murmured as her hand slipped away from his skin and came to rest on his chest. “All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best that we can do is to start over.”

She paused, and maybe it was the look of surprise on Steve’s face that stopped her short. He whispered, “You said that to me once before.”

“Well, it’s good advice,” she said, her smile wobbling a little and her eyes brimming as she added very softly, “It’s what I did.”

He closed his eyes and bowed his head. There was nothing unbroken left in him to shatter, so he didn’t cry or rail against the unfairness of it. There was no point. It wouldn’t change anything. Resignation spread through his limbs and settled deep into his core, blunting the edges of his disappointment until it almost belonged to someone else. Like he was no more than a passenger in his own body, watching through the detached perspective of a stranger while his last hope for true happiness crumbled into ashes in his hands. The only thing left for him to feel was exhaustion.

“I’m sorry, Steve,” Peggy said, smoothing over his shoulders and down his arms, taking his hands and squeezing. She meant it, he could tell, but that didn’t change the fact that she’d moved on. With the air of someone clutching at straws, she added, “We can still have that dance.”

Somehow, he smiled at that and managed to lift his head. “I’d like that.”

“So would I,” she said.

There was a record player against the wall. Steve rifled through Peggy’s selection of music until he found exactly the song he’d been hoping for and set the record spinning. The brass accompaniment filled the little living room as she slipped into his arms, and it was exactly as he’d hoped it might be in those last moments before Schmitt’s plane went down. He closed his eyes tight and tried to memorise every passing second, before the moment was lost forever.

“Better late than never,” Peggy whispered as the final notes crackled into silence.

“Yeah,” he sighed, opening his eyes. She lifted her head from where it had come to rest against his shoulder and for a moment Steve thought about kissing her. He ought to want to, even if he couldn’t – but there was nothing. Just a lonely kind of affection, left behind by the people they had once been. She drifted away to shut off the record player and out of nowhere, without thinking, he asked, “What’s he like?”

Peggy glanced at him as she slid the record back into its sleeve, but whatever she saw in his face was apparently the right thing, because she said, “His name is Daniel. We work together.”

“And he’s good to you?” Steve said, and found that he really wanted to know.

The Peggy he had known after he woke up from the ice didn’t wear a wedding band and she’d never talked about a husband or partner, but he was there in the photographs arranged at her bedside. Many times Steve had wondered why she didn’t mention him: was it to spare him, or to spare herself from the memory of another man she’d lost, or was it because, on the bad days, she couldn’t remember him at all? He didn’t know. He’d been too afraid to ask, and then it was too late. It had been hard at first to acknowledge that Peggy had made a future with someone else after he was gone but he never resented her for finding happiness. He still didn’t, somehow.

“Yes,” Peggy said, and though he couldn’t see her face he could hear that she was smiling just for thinking about him. She straightened from putting the record away and turned around. “He respects me and my work, and he doesn’t expect me to be any different than I am.”

“I’m glad,” he said quietly. She deserved someone who saw her for who she was and loved her because of it.

“You really are, aren’t you?” she said.

She wasn’t really asking a question, rather wondering out loud that he could be happy for her. It was hard, and it hurt, but he couldn’t be anything else. He didn’t have the right to ask her to give it up, certainly not for the shell of someone she’d once cared for.

“I’d like to go over a few things,” she said, changing the subject with admirable tact. “Where the plane crashed, for a start. Everything you can remember about Hydra, and where they might be holding Sergeant Barnes.”

“Why?” he frowned.

“Because I’m not going to stand by and let Hydra corrupt the SSR – or SHIELD, or any other organisation – let alone leave you in the ice and him to be experimented on,” she replied in a tone that suggested this was obvious, and he was being slow on the uptake. “I need your intel before you go back.”

“Peggy,” Steve said quietly, shaking his head. “I can’t go back.”

~

Bucky walked down to the bench where Steve was sitting and stared at the water. “What.”

He hadn’t really wanted to come and talk to him, but Sam had said that he wanted a word and Bucky couldn’t say no. Not when it was Steve.

In his peripheral vision, Steve looked up at him. “You’re not going to sit down?”

He sounded _so old_. He looked smaller, too, more fragile, as if maybe the serum that turned him into Captain America had finally started to wear off as he aged, dialling him back towards the skinny little guy he’d been growing up.

“No,” Bucky said flatly. He wasn’t even mad, really. He got it: Steve had a chance to press the ‘reset’ button on his life – to do it all over again and get it right – and he’d taken it. Bucky couldn’t hate him for that. He’d do the same thing, if he had the chance. Turn back the clock so that he actually did die when he fell from that train, maybe. That’d be best for everyone.

“All right,” Steve said, as if he expected the rejection. “Bucky, I need you to do something for me.”

“What,” Bucky repeated. He would do it. He would _always_ do it. It didn’t matter what Steve asked of him: he’d try.

Steve fished something out of his pocket and held it up. “I need you to go back and get me.”

Bucky looked at him finally. In his hand was a pair of electronic bands similar to the one Steve had been wearing five minutes and seventy years ago. He frowned and asked, “What do you mean, get you? I thought –” He couldn’t say it, he _couldn’t_ , but then he saw the flash of gold around Steve’s finger and choked out, “What about Peggy?”

He wouldn’t take that away from Steve, not for anybody, especially not for himself. He didn’t have the heart when Steve had waited so long to be happy.

“What about her, Buck?” Steve said. He got up slowly, and Bucky ached to help him the way he had when they were kids, but he held himself back and kept his hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets. He had a shred of self-preservation left. Steve sighed once he was on his feet and turned towards him. He really was shorter. Even though he stood as straight as ever, he had to look up to meet Bucky’s gaze. “Listen, I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be. I should never have left you like this, especially for a whole lot of nothing. I’m sorry that I did.”

“But you went back to be with her,” Bucky said, frowning. What Steve was saying didn’t fit quite right around the facts and it was an echo of those first few weeks after the fall of SHIELD and Hydra, when he was essentially a weapon dressed up like a person, the parts of him that were James Buchanan Barnes still rattling around all out of order so that nothing made sense.

“Yeah, and she’d moved on – same as me, though I didn’t want to admit it. Think you could go back to, say, 1940 and pick up where you left off with one of your girls?” Steve said, and Bucky huffed in bitter amusement at the very idea, despite himself. It just wasn’t possible. Steve smiled at him, face full of wrinkles but still the same smile. “Exactly. It was a stupid decision – stupid _and_ selfish, and now ’cause I used up the last of my Pym Particles to get to her, I’m stuck.”

“But you’ve had a life,” Bucky said softly. His eyes were drawn again to the wedding ring. Steve wouldn’t just give that up, surely. Not to come back to a home he didn’t even want. It might not be with Peggy, but he’d managed to find what he’d been longing for.

“Not yet I haven’t,” Steve chuckled. He reached into the other pocket of his jacket and retrieved a third band, which slotted perfectly around the bones of his hand like it was made to go there. Bucky stared, and then he stared some more, his blood starting to thump in his ears.

“You’re not from …?” he said.

“The past? No,” Steve replied, and there was that spark in his eye that had been dead ever since the battle, that Bucky had missed like losing another limb. “I’m here to close a very long loop. So can you help a guy out?”

“I guess from where you’re standing, I already have,” Bucky said softly, holding out his hand and hoping to goodness that he was right.

“Now you’re getting it,” Steve said. He carefully slid one of the devices over Bucky’s fingers to rest above his knuckles and placed the second into his palm before closing both his hands around Bucky’s. “There’s enough particles for one trip there and two trips back. Time and date’s already set, and you’ll want the house right in front of you. Bring me home, Buck.”

“What about you?” Bucky asked as Steve’s fingers slipped away from his.

“Well, you’ll be missing me. I promised this wouldn’t take too long,” he replied, glancing down at the device circling his own hand, and Bucky’s heart tapped out an irregular pattern against his throat. He let himself imagine still looking out for Steve even when they were old and grey, the way he’d always meant to before the war. If he got this right, that was his future too.

Steve reached for the button to activate the device, but Bucky stopped him with a gentle hand around his arm. “It turns out okay?” he asked, a little desperately. He needed to hear it. “Without Peggy. You’re okay.”

“’Course I’m okay,” Steve said, and though his voice was different it held the same warmth as always, the same fondness, the same exasperation, “I got you.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said roughly, eyes burning. Steve would have him for as long as he’d let him stick around, he wasn’t going anywhere.

Steve patted his hand. “Just give me time. Some things are worth waiting for.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bucky asked as he let go.

“You’ll find out,” Steve said, still smiling. Then he pressed the button to activate his suit, and a moment later he was gone.

Bucky shoved the spare band into his pocket and scrubbed a hand over his face. He wondered if he needed to use the focusing platform, or at least tell Sam and Banner what was going on, but Steve hadn’t said anything about it so he didn’t bother. If this went right, he could explain after. He took a breath and tapped the button.


End file.
